A COVID-era 'cheers pan' is officially a museum exhibit
Let's talk about why we don't talk about the pandemic anniversary.
A cold Monday this January, two longtime buds and I found ourselves in need of a chat, a few day beers and a vigorous weekday afternoon messaround. The starting destination was the Museum of the City of New York, which is small and always satisfying but can be knocked out in an afternoon, and mercifully free of lumbering tourist hordes. It's for New York sickos only.
The museum’s permanent collection on the first floor is a multimedia, object-focused 400-year history through the city’s densely packed history called “New York at Its Core.” Lined up like apartment buildings, the display cases are inhabited by artifacts from chunks of the city’s history: a Lenape Indian war club, the first ticket ever sold to ride the subway, the drafting kit of Calvert Vaux, ticker tape, a baseball signed by Jackie Robinson, Boss Tweed’s cufflinks and rubble from the Twin Towers.
The 2020 piece of the exhibit kind of snuck up on us; I’m still thinking about one item in it that now stands forever as a really weird artifact of that really weird time. Among the facemask and magazine covers capturing virus-related doom in that display case, there was a metal pot, sitting in the exhibit labeled and tagged for art consumption. The label reads “7:00 cheers pan,” adding the date of the objet d'art’s creation date, “1992-1993.”
This initially caught me as a little absurd, such a mundane object from an ultimately short-lived era of goodwill in the early pandemic, squeezed in between the horror of the first wave and the explosion of protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. It’s just a saucepan. It looked pretty regular as far as saucepans go. I didn’t even see a dent.
The 7 p.m. clap for essential workers — a category that included everyone from grocery workers to ER nurses — was, in my opinion, mostly good. On top of the vague but I believe earnest message of support, it gave us a chance to do two essential New York things that were taken from us during the lockdown: seeing our neighbors and being loud as hell. Some people thought it was a little cringe, symbolism over substance, the lapel safety pin of 2020. Either way, was it all museum worthy?
